A Multimedia-Centric Quality Assurance System for Traffic Messages

We present here a technical system for multimedia-centric verification of traffic situations. Traffic messages from various message sources are automatically linked to the video streams of corresponding surveillance cameras in order to support traffic editors in improving the quality of published traffic messages. Video streams can be recorded for certain types of traffic situations and can also be provided as live streams during the verification stage. Both on-demand and live provision of the streams is achieved based on a distributed video scene-recording system that interacts with the video subsection of the Austrian national operator of the highways and motorways (ASFINAG). The situation verification is enabled by a web application which provides (1) an integrated view of the details of a traffic message, (2) a web map illustrating the location and spatial dissemination of the traffic situation, and (3) the recordings and live streams from selected cameras provided by the scene-recording system. Based on the verification result, the traffic editor may then publish traffic situation scenes with enhanced descriptive data about the traffic situation. The system was deployed in the operational environment of ASFINAG and tested by traffic editors at the national radio channel Hitradio O3. Evaluation results have shown that this system considerably improves the verification process of the previous system both in terms of speed and accuracy.